Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles?
That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures something.
If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said again and see if they were actually right.
Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?
I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention, even though I'm not such a high-ranking commenter.
Agreed. I find karma average of little interest. Unfortunately it does encourage a certain type of bad behavior in those who do. I can appreciate what pg is trying to achieve with it, but I don't think it's helped the site, and in fact has perhaps detracted from some conversations that "could have happened" except the people came late to the thread.
I personally sometimes won't bother commenting on a low comment simply because there is little chance of an interesting coversation happening there.
The other thing that's messed up now is duplicate submission. They should be forbidden again. Find a way to get the duped article to the front page if we're trying to make sure it's seen (maybe with a different decay constant), but allowing the resubmission takes away the original conversation.
First, I hope my upvote just gave your average a bit of a boost.
Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :)
Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.
Thanks. That comment was my biggest hitting one ever, so my average will probably jump quite a bit. Funny that it should be in a meta-karma thread.
I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only participation and quality, but on timing.
Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :)
* Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.
When I comment my goal is to have the most Karma per thread.
In some ways its very Karmic in that my goal is to maximize all users Karma over my own individual Karma. I get really excited when a comment of mine results in multiple 20+ Karma comments because that means I'm really contributing.
OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions?
It's limited by time and other factors. If you haven't commented on anything for a considerable time then there aren't enough values to average.
I think it works like this: Take the last N values from the last T time, discard the largest (and perhaps the smallest) and compute the average of what's left. If there aren't enough, don't bother.
For more details, read the code. It's available here somewhere ...
You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Most people submit articles in some part because they receive karma points for interesting submissions. It's not just by magic that good articles "tend to find their way here."
The good articles arent the issue though, maybe we need some sort of penalty on bad articles that would prevent people posting anything and everything hoping at least something will catch on.
I'm not much one for game theory, but this just came to mind.
Maybe we shouldn't penalize articles that don't gain attention, but it should have a determined negative score in the back end, while displaying 0 or 1 to users on the front end. The initial score could be calculated somehow through the karma (or possibly comment karma average) of the submitter and length of time the submitter has been a member of HN.
When a newer, but established, user submits an article, it could need up to 15 upvotes before it actually starts gaining the user karma/points, for example. The score could then start to adjust to it's actual total as it becomes more active.
My only issue with actually penalizing articles that don't get attention is because some articles may be submitted a few times over the course of a day from different sources, yet the later submitted ones in what I have unscientifically observed seem to be the most active. The actual information in the article is completely relevant, but due to whatever probabilistic cause, they just don't get noticed. I don't think it's "right" to penalize a submitter because no one else was on the ball, so to speak.
Your right, maybe it has to be about average score. People are going to submit good stuff that doesn't catch on. The only real behavior your trying to avoid is people submitting regardless of quality.
Surfacing good links is part of the attraction of HN. Taking away the karma benefit for link sharing would lessen the incentive to share articles that don't actually need any discussion.
Lately, I see we don't give points for meaningfulness more than for popularity.
Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem.
I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree.
The very best submissions get virtually no discussion.
One measurement to make might be the votes divided by comments.
Let V = votes
Let C = comments
Let IT = 1.0
Let R = V/C
If R > IT then the article is "worth IT"
Let "the paper it's written on" be 0.1.
If R < "the paper it's written on" then it's not worth the paper it's written on (not that it's written on paper, but you get the idea).
But all this is tinkering around the edges, and doesn't feel like it's significant. Perhaps a new model of how a site like this works at all is necessary.
"The very best submissions get virtually no discussion."
I'm not sure I agree with you on that. The best stories produce a high volume of high-quality discussion. Your proposed algo punishes submissions that generate discussion, which seems to be the opposite of what's desirable.
I have to agree with RiderOfGiraffes -- an article with a high number of comments relative to points usually indicates that the article is more opinionated than informative, since most everyone who upvoted it posted their personal reaction to it. Although they are popular, I feel these are usually low-value articles and discussions.
Additionally, it's very hard to have a high-quality discussion that is also high-volume. Once an article's comments get over several pages long, you can be sure that most commenters are not reading everything before commenting, so you get a lot of similar comments. Sometimes this is valuable (e.g. "Ask HN"), but most of the time it just worsens the signal-to-noise ratio.
Maybe we just need a semantic distinction between editorials (opinion pieces) and articles (investigative/fact-laden pieces)? Perhaps make editorials count for less, in the same way self-posts currently do?
I think those good stories that generate good discussion still get more points than comments. With the really good stories, no matter how many people comment, more people upvote, because there are lurkers.
It's not perfect, but I'm finding it a pretty good predictor.
Judging meaningfulness by the size of the tree won't work. Looking at which threads have a large number of replies, that's more of an indicator of controversialness.
Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone.
For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles.
So, the scenario would be like this:
- new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which are spent upon submission.
- If the article gets upvoted 5 times, the karma is refunded, and the cost is still 5 karma to submit.
- If the article does not get upvoted 5 times (or is flagged more than upvoted, or whatever) then the user loses the karma cost, and their next submission costs 10 karma. If the user doesn't have 10 karma, they can't submit.
There is a low entry cost, and good submissions aren't penalized, while bad or negative submissions are penalized progressively. There is no point at which the user is 'banned', but they have to earn progressively more and more karma to keep submitting. For high-karma users, this should allow them the luxury of gambling some karma on things they want shown, while lower-karma members have to be more mindful of whether they think this is worth gambling their karma on.
The problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time.
So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly than it probably should be.
Well, the hope would be to reduce the signal to noise ratio, so, in the event that something less popular comes up, it should have more time to be seen and appreciated.
I would also venture that 'cutting edge' is HN's bailiwick, and therefore, it's really hard to get ahead of the tech curve here.
Ha. Don't tell the guys at Lambda the Ultimate that ;)
Incidentally, i submitted a link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ) about an hour ago, and after watching it depressingly fall off the first page of the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting a link to HN again.
What's so frustrating is that i can identify content that is good, and relevant (the link above is about open data, citizen access to data, and information management), which are obviously relevant to the hacker news community.
But the only ways i can think to remedy this would be to either lobby my friends hard to vote up the link (something i'm loathe to do), or start pimping the links on other sites, in the hopes that people will try to submit it, see the existing link, and vote it up.
There's just no way i can do better than a piece of content like this. Oh well. I guess i'll stick to commenting.
> i submitted a link ... about an hour ago, and after
> watching it depressingly fall off the first page of
> the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting
> a link to HN again.
> What's so frustrating is that i can identify content
> that is good, and relevant (the link above is about
> open data, citizen access to data, and information
> management), which are obviously relevant to the
> hacker news community.
Maybe it's just me, but I submit that you are mistaken. For example, I saw it, and it is of zero interest to me. I write code for a living, I manage people who write code, I run two companies, one of which produces code, and I don't think it's of interest.
That doesn't mean it's of zero interest to everyone. That doesn't mean it should be of zero interest to everyone. It does mean that you are mistaken in your belief that founders and hackers would be interested, if only they'd seen it.
I appreciate the POV. At the risk of litigating a separate issue, i think you're wrong. Aside from people who care about big data, information gathering and management by the government is a big deal for journalists, people who interact with the government, and ultimately tax payers.
You're going to fall into at least one of those categories, and i think that hackers in particular are going to fall into multiple of those categories (that i happen to know from personal experience).
But if you didn't think it was relevant, then i certainly don't think you're obligated to upvote. :)
I think you misunderstand me. What the Government does with your data, and what it doesn't do, is big news, of great interest, to everyone.
And that's my point.
It should be of interest to everyone, and it's got nothing specifically related to being a hacker, being a founder, running a project, or other technical issues that are the point, purpose and focus of this community.
Or once were.
And before someone trots out the "satisfies intellectual curiosity" line from the guidelines let me just say no, it doesn't, and if you think it does then you have a very different concept of "intellectual" from mine.
So I'm not saying it's uninteresting in general, I'm saying it's uninteresting to this community as I understand it ought to be.
And in consequence it's clear that you have a different understanding about with this community ought to be. Maybe I'm now out-of-date, and it's changed into something with which I don't share significant overlap.
Well, i note that we joined hacker news within 40 days of each other. Given that, i'd hazard to say we at least have some similar sense of what the community is (although obviously there's an element of self selection in terms of what we read and contribute to).
At the same time, if you don't find the generalist argument persuasive, i'd fall back on the point i skipped previously, which is that this is of direct interest to data geeks. One of the major information brokers, which is interesting both as an individual instance, and as a representative of all large information brokers is fundamentally broken internally.
This is a data processing and scaling issue laid out in a way that should make us ask what's wrong, and what it is that can be done to fix these sorts of problems.
Put more succinctly, this is a problem in our domain.
information gathering and management by the government is a big deal for journalists, people who interact with the government, and ultimately tax payers
I think you're getting into a long-deplored mailing-list tendency for people to ascribe general attributes to their community based on personal preference. "I like ice-cream, lots of other people probably like ice cream, so it's a good post for HN." Journalistic feature-creep, if you will.
My point being that yes, we are all tax-payers more or less, but that doesn't mean everything paid for with tax revenues is germane. Syllogistic posting rationales tend to cast a wider and wider umbrella, sometimes venturing into the realm of slippery slopes.
Actually, i typically err far on the other side. There are many pieces of information that i read hours or days before they appear here or in other social media aggregators, and that has lead me to the impression that i should be contributing more.
Additionally, i do feel that i have some sense of the hacker news demographic having both been a part of it, and watching the sort of content that does generate discussion.
So i'm cognizant of the problem, and i'd like to think that gives me at least some ability to compensate from the bias.
I've had a number of submission woes that mirror yours. Just KNOWING that people would like it if they saw it (right or wrong,) but seeing how quickly things move from newest to gone is the big worry.
The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach.
If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions.
Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.
Please keep submitting. Honestly, what does well on the HN is stuff that grabs people. There are two ways to do that:
1) Match peoples' interests
2) Write really really well
So, you can either submit articles like "BubbleTwit (YC '08) gets $14B in funding, announces Natalie Portman is new CEO" or you can just keep writing and writing and writing until you get really good.
I'm mostly suggesting this because it's what I wish I would do. I'm not that good yet.
I peeked at your post... I think it is a fascinating subject, but your title and opening paragraph don't work that well. "Sustainable" doesn't mean anything without context. Your opening paragraph doesn't really create any kind of desperate need. What is the specific crash going to look like? Paint us a picture of destruction, and then lead us out of it. Great writing grabs people and holds their faces in front of something real.
I don't doubt that you've got real things to show people, so just keep working on the craft, and you'll get there.
There are many submissions that I read on the new page that I like, but aren't something I want in my saved list forever. I don't know if many other people treat article upvotes as I do, but it might explain part of the difficulty.
The problem with this is what it will do to the comments on the article. There have been many times where I have an idea for a comment that I know will get me karma, but I don't think that it really belongs on HN, so I don't submit it. Since I don't have that much karma, if this system was in place I very possibly submit the comment so I could submit more articles later.
I like the system on Reddit where link karma and comment karma is separated. That way, people whose main incentive to post links is to gain karma still get it, but it's also easy to see the karma gained on commenting. In my opinion, it's the best of both worlds.
Submitting good articles is definitely of value, so HN should give out Karma for it. However, I believe because articles cannot be downvoted, there is no risk involved for spam bots and spammy humans alike. The solution seems simple: allow downvoting on articles that are younger than one hour. And add captcha for submissions.
In the scheme I'm trying, it costs you karma to upvote or downvote, which gets converted to non-spendable clout. You get a small portion of karma everyday, which increases as you have more clout (and followers, another aspect I added). If you have spent all your karma, you cannot submit stories until you earn some. Here I was trying to limit the effect of users that are new, and of those that have not contributed appreciated content or comments.
That said, you've got me rethinking the idea of karma for submissions... It might be better to have submissions only increase clout. -Therefore, it will only slightly increase a user's karma-earning rate. Good comments will be the best way to get karma. Yes. I am going to try that. Thanks!
To downvote on SO you need a certain number of points, which you get by doing other activities [like posting or answering questions]. After reaching that threshold, you can choose to downvote a question or response, which costs you one point and costs the other person 2 points. I.e. If you wanted to downvote this post, i would lose 2 karma and you would lose 1.
Also: why does anyone care about kharma? I look at votes on a comment or an article, but I don't really care how much kharma any person has. Do people really look at it as something to maximize?
The only time I have taken karma in to consideration is when I disagree with someone either in principle or in technical merit. If I were to even respond to such a post, I want to know if I am dealing with a troll or someone who is a highly regarded member of the community because they have earned their karma. Basically, I let it influence how I might approach someone to a certain extent. Other than that, I could care less what my or anyone else's karma is.
Rather than karma/comments I'd like to see karma/uniques. Keep count of the logged in users that have seen the comment. Use a little Javascript to figure out which comments have been visible in their browser window long enough to read them.
This could be avoid by giving karma points till 10 up votes on story. After that all up votes on story doesn't give any karma advantage. Still showing up votes on story make sense not karma advantage to submitter.
It just foolish that some high profile story give someone lots of karma advantage then good commenters because someone submitted it first.
Honestly, using the word "karma" to refer to votes just sounds arrogant. Real karma has nothing to do with human opinions, and any system that claims to quantize or measure it probably does more to encourage petty politics.
Indeed: to reward quality over quantity you'd need to use a function such as x^2, or probably x^2/C for some constant C.
Interestingly, Oxford University used to mark final exams for Mathematics and associated schools (such as Computer Science) in this way. Questions would typically start with parts that were largely "book work" and move on to parts that required more careful thought. In addition, you could answer as many questions as you like. Therefore, to avoid people getting lots of marks by just answering all the book work, the papers were scored by squaring the scores for each question and then summing those squares.
That is: overall_score = sum(q in Questions | score(q)^2)
This practice stopped in ~2003 (now you can still answer as many as you like, but the mark for the paper is the sum of your top 3 marks for individual questions, so it's only really worth answering 3 as well as you can).
Someone who submits only for the karma can already make lots of mediocre submissions and boost their karma far more than under a logarithmic scale.
The only case I could see where your point is valid is if "karma abusers" withhold lower quality submissions in the hopes that they'll submit a really popular one. Do you know if they do this? Or am I misunderstanding the rationale?
The maths is backwards. To take an example, if I submit two stories under a log2-scaled points system which get four upvotes, then if you submit a single story, that story needs to get 16 upvotes for you to match my karma.
Assuming that people are chasing karma (let's leave why to the side for a second, because I don't understand it either), then it's far more efficient to submit lots of low-scoring stories than to even bother thinking about high-scoring ones.
I'm in favor of karma to remain as it is. Why? When I have some long thoughts to share I break it off into it's own thorough post and submit it. I thought that was the preferred behavior around here.
However the system relies on upvotes to see good articles from the bad ones.
So the system would still rely on upvotes but perhaps not give karma? #my2cents
That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures something.
If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said again and see if they were actually right.
Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?